About a dozen chairs are lined up across the living room, a bible underneath each. Children run around the house, dropping crayons and prayer pamphlets as they go. In the kitchen, women prepare post-service meals and wine and bread for communion. 

“Many people think that house churches aren’t a legitimate church. They may not ever come because they think it’s weird, or they don’t want to intrude in someone else’s house,” said Jonas Croissant, the pastor of The Acts Church of Maricopa, which meets in his home. 

“In the Bible people are supposed to be seeing the church as a body of different members, not a spectator sport where people come and sit in the audience, where the pastor and the worship leader are the only two who speak and everything is scripted to the second,” he said.

Croissant believes churches should be a place for people to interact, making prayer requests and sharing testimonies. House churches, he said, provide intimacy that bigger churches may be missing.

House churches are homes where people worship together, often when they don’t have access to a larger church. Though less common in the U.S. than many other parts of the world, some Arizonans gather this way. 

Wolfgang Simson, who studies missions, published a 2021 update on global house churches called “The Fastest Growing Expression of Christ-Followers on the Planet,” describing the diversity of these home-based worship spaces. 

Simson estimates that there are nearly 10 million house churches in China, with some 160-200 million members; about 80 million people in India, Egypt and the Middle East worship in some 2 million house churches; and in countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Korea and Israel he found about 1 million house churches. 

Many house churches keep their gatherings off the radar because of religious persecution, Simson said. And while many are in members’ homes, they can also be in other spaces, such as under a tree, common in places like Uganda, Simson wrote.

In the U.S., such informal meeting spaces are much less common. Simson estimated there are only about 1.5 million house churches in the U.S.

“In France, where I’m from, and in many parts of the world, this is actually a very common way of gathering, if not the most common way of gathering,” Croissant said. “All over the world house churches are actually the most common way that church occurs. Here it’s the odd ball, but if you look at the global church it is the majority.”

He said there is a stigma around house churches in the U.S. of seeming cultish and untrustworthy that he didn’t experience in France. And it is more difficult for Americans to trust groups like his.

Religious attendance generally has also declined in the United States. 

A 2025 Pew Research study on the state of Christianity in America, found that fewer young people are attending church services. Nearly 60% of adults ages 54 and older reported participating in a religious congregation or church, according to the study, while only 27% of younger adults reported attending church services.

Croissant thinks house churches, while uncommon, can address some of the factors that are pushing people away from religion. Pastoring his smaller congregation in his home provides a more intimate setting than a typical church, which keeps the focus on people rather than finances, he said.

“When you have a big church and there’s a budget and a mortgage, sometimes the pastors are kind of pressured to say things that are not going to make 20% of the members with memberships walk away,” he said. “In my case, I can just say whatever the Bible says, being both clear and gentle, but I can teach the Bible because I don’t need any money.”

He said his house church is part of The Family Integrated Church Network. It encourages parents and children to worship together, rather than separating children and adults into different rooms and activities, as is common in many larger churches. The small size of the house church makes it easier to keep everyone together, he said. 

Eric Cepin, 53 also aims to incorporate families into his Tucson house church, The Village Church, where he believes a more comfortable, homey environment helps faith grow. 

He started the house church to reach people who didn’t gravitate towards a larger church, he said.

“All of my friends who aren’t followers of Jesus were not going to come to my church, so I decided to try and make a church for my friends,” he said. 

“Oftentimes church actually made more of a hindrance for people, and soon became more foreign in the late 90s and early 2000s, and was sometimes just a really scary place to go,” he said. “So we were trying to create a place where people could meet comfortably.”

People tend to be invisible in larger churches, Crepin said. But in house church environments he believes everyone feels needed and valued. As a smaller group, members of the congregation provide food, run errands and help with church finances. 

“The whole drive for our community is to be a place where people can come who don’t fit in other churches,” he said.

Many members of his congregation are new to the faith or have had negative experiences with other churches, he said.

In his home, he said, members “know that the value is community, and the value is human beings.”

Professor Grant Adamson, a senior lecturer of religious studies and classics at the University of Arizona, said the house church movement isn’t new. 

“The earliest Christians met in private homes and house churches for a long time while the religion was still small and while it did not own property or have state sponsorship,” he said.

Both Croissant and Cepin said it can be difficult to fund and find space for a house church. But they say it also gives them more freedom in what they preach and teach and how to use the church’s money.

Ultimately, Croissant said, where religious services are held is irrelevant. 

“At the end of the day we realize that none of that matters but that people come to know the gospel, no matter the building,” he said

Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism.